In the last several years, the World Wide Web, or the Internet, has been blended with a variety of other technologies to create new, innovative, and globally accessible applications. Such blended technologies include on-line airline reservation systems, weather monitoring systems, catalog purchasing, stock trading, as well as many others. An example of such a blended technology developed by Accord Telecommunications Ltd., now Polycom Israel, Ltd., the assignee of the present invention, monitors and controls a video conference through the use of a website interface.
Utilizing existing technology to establish a video conference, a service provider is enlisted to reserve, set up, monitor and control the video conference. In this configuration, an operator must either attend the conference, monitor the conference, or at least be in contact via telephone, or some other means, with one of the participants of the video conference. The role of the operator is to monitor the video conference and resolve any problems that may arise. In addition, the operator can control various aspects of the video conference, such as, muting, video configurations, entrance and exits to the video conference, or the like. For example, if one of the participants in a video conference wants to mute another participant in the video conference, the initiating participant must notify the operator. The operator then mutes the other participant and provides an indicator to the other participants of such. Simple control over a video conference such as this requires the presence and attention of the operator.
The use of an operator within a video conference results in increasing the cost for video conferencing services. For each active video conference, sufficient operator support must be available. If a single operator is required to control multiple video conferences, the quality of service may suffer during busy or peak operational times. If a separate operator is assigned to each video conference to ensure a high-quality of performance, the cost of the video conferencing service may escalate.
In addition, in state of the art video conferencing technologies, the participants in a video conference may not be automatically made aware of the status of the video conference. For example, a participant may not know if another participant is joining into the conference or if a participant has muted himself via his or her terminal. In the current art video conferencing technologies, only the operator has access to such information. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method to allow individual participants in a video conference to obtain status information pertaining to the video conference and the other participants in the video conference. It is desirable to provide a solution which allows the individual participants in a video conference to control and/or obtain status information without requiring the intervention of an operator. The solution presented in the present invention is to utilize an Internet based monitoring and control system to replace some or all of the functions of the operator. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and a method to blend video conferencing technology with Internet or network technology.
Often times, when blending existing technologies, short comings or incompatibilities arise that require innovative engineering to overcome. The use of a networked based monitoring and control system for video conferences encounters such incompatibilities. The most apparent incompatibility in the video conferencing example arises based on the need for continuously providing updated information to the participants of a video conference. The status information pertaining to a video conference can change rapidly and often. Obtaining and tracking this status information in real-time can be processor intensive. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method that can receive and rapidly process the status information available during a video conference.
Internet technologies were not developed for the purpose of providing and rapidly updating information. Rather, the Internet was designed to extract vast amounts of generally static information. Nonetheless, several attempts have been made to utilize the Internet in a manner to support monitoring or receiving information that is periodically updated, or more succinctly stated, to provide updateable web pages.
The most rudimentary technique to provide updateable web pages is the refresh function. Typically, state of the art web browsers are equipped with a function or button which, when invoked, will cause the browser to reload updated information from a displayed website. This process involves reloading the data from a web server without having any prior knowledge as to whether the data has changed or not. This technique is inadequate for many applications because it requires the viewer of the website to continuously invoke the refresh function to obtain updated information. If no new information is available, time and bandwidth are needlessly expended.
Another technique to provide updateable web pages is to automatically invoke the refresh function. This technique eliminates the requirement for the viewer to manually and continuously invoke the refresh button; however similar to the previous technique, this automated technique is inadequate in that it wastes a significant amount of time and bandwidth. The refresh function must be invoked in order to obtain updated information. However, the refresh function is invoked blindly, because the viewer does not know if updated information is available or not. Thus, the refresh function may be invoked multiple times without providing any updated information. Therefore there is a need in the art for a system and a method to provide updated information in an Internet environment that minimizes the waste of time and bandwidth by only providing information when it has actually been updated or modified.
Another advanced technique for providing updateable web pages is to include a Java applet on the viewer's page. An applet invokes processing on the viewer's computer system. In operation, the applet opens a TCP/IP socket to the server in order to send and receive data from the server. Upon receiving the information from the server, the applet updates the web page with the new information. This technique for providing updateable web pages has several disadvantages. One such disadvantage is that this technique requires the opening of an additional TCP port on the firewall of the service provider. This opens the server to additional security risks. Another disadvantage is that large applets that include a significant amount of code take a substantial amount of time to load on the viewer's computer system. In addition, in some sites the browser does not support Java applets. Yet another disadvantage of this technique is that when transferring data using TCP/IP, the serialization and the de-serialization of the data has to be programmed (unless the server was written in Java). For instance, if the data received is a long string with delimiters, to parse the data and extract necessary information, code must be written to perform the task. However, the structure of the data would be known to a Java script.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method to provide updateable web pages that are not limited to the use of Java applets. There is also a need in the art for such a system to be compatible with a variety of web page types and to quickly update.
Therefore, it is clear that there is a need in the art for a system and method to provide updateable web pages that reduce or eliminate above-described problems. There is also a need in the art for such a system and method that can be used for monitoring and controlling a video conference without the need for operator intervention.
Therefore, it is clear that there is a need in the art for a system and a method of monitoring video and/or audio conferencing through a rapid-update website.